Jones was born in Okmulgee, Oklahoma to a Welsh-born father and a Choctaw/Cherokee mother. Neither parent had more than a grade school education. His parents marriage had largely ended by the time he was 9 years old, and he and his mother moved to Manteca, California under an Indian relocation program. In Oklahoma, he had been instructed in Native American traditions by his maternal grandmother; in California he lived in a largely Hispanic environment and at times did farm work, which was his mother's occupation. Although he did poorly in school other than excelling in art classes and physical education, he managed to graduate from high school in 1959, and attended San Jose City College. A job as an office boy at architecture firm Higgins & Root in San Jose, combined with his drawing skills set him on the first steps of his career. With help from his boss Chester Root he entered the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, where for the first time he became a serious student, and where he began his interest in Native American architecture, more neglected in the U. of O. curriculum of the time than not. He continued to work summers at Higgins & Root. After graduating in 1967, he moved in Seattle, working briefly for Paul Thiry, then at Dersham & Dimmick, before opening a practice on Bainbridge Island. He became increasingly involve in Native American matters, joining the Urban Indian Committee, where he first came to know Native activist Bernie Whitebear. In the early 1970s, he met landscape architect Grant Richard Jones, who was studying the Native American burial mounds of the Midwest. In 1973, he joined Grant Jones and Grant's then-wife Ilze Jones at Jones & Jones, based in the Globe Building in Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood.
Work at Jones and Jones
Zoo projects
Although his colleague Grant Jones led the pioneering immersion exhibit work on the Gorilla exhibit and the African Savannah exhibit at Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo, Johnpaul Jones has led numerous zoo projects since that time. Among these are:
Main source for list: His Vancouver Land Bridge in Vancouver, Washington was designed in conjunction with Maya Lin as part of her Confluence Project. The bridge, "retracing part of the ancient Klickitat Trail Indian path with a curving, commemorative walkway above State Route 14" provides pedestrian access from Fort Vancouver to the Columbia River waterfront for the first time in decades. Jones was lead design consultant for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. Jones's involvement began when Heye Foundation was looking to house some of the collections that eventually became part of this museum. At that time, it looked like Ross Perot might acquire the collections for a new museum in Dallas, Texas, and Jones was involved on a consulting basis. According to Jones, the resulting museum "doesn't have a straight line in it… It centers around something very organic, that which is common to Indian communities around the nation. It centers around the four worlds: the natural world, the animal world, the human world and the spirit world… Within each one of those worlds is something that helped us in the design of this building, the site the interiors."
Jones married fellow University of Oregon student Hannah Stratton in 1965. They had two children, Sequoiah and Ingrid, and divorced in 1990. Jones married for a second time to Marjorie Sheldon on September 21, 1997.
